Nancy Reddy on the granddaddies of "maternal attachment" studies

who's making it strange here?

There’s a scene in Better Off Dead where John Cusack’s little brother mail-orders a book called How To Pick Up Trashy Women. Later on, we see him partying with a bunch of women in minis.

This is how I feel about some parenting advice. Parenting can and can’t be taught. It is and isn’t a secret. Mothers yearn for the advice, though, driven by anxiety and normative pressures. They’ve been training for years. We all want to be “good” parents.

The research on parenting and motherhood is an ocean, but if you throw a net in, you typically come up with the same few foundational studies: for one, the “cloth mother” monkey experiments by Harry Harlow (sadistic), showing monkey attachments to a soft, eternally watching mother shape, which helped shift parenting recommendations in the United States away from the anti-coddling prescriptions of Victorian times and toward the more intensive model of the omnipresent mother we have today (babywear! room-share! feed on demand! definitely do not ditch your kid and husband and have a psychosexual holiday a few miles away in a motel).

mom? … MOM?

For another, there is Mary Ainsworth’s “strange situation” experiment, in which babies are observed after their mothers leave the room and, based on the level of anxiety they display, diagnosed with an attachment style. Ainsworth built on the attachment theory work of John Bowlby, a guy about which Nancy Reddy has a lot to say.

Reddy’s new book, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom, takes a good hard look at the work of Bowlby, Harlow, Ainsworth, and others, and at the contradictions in their lives—these researchers were surprisingly shit at parenting themselves, quite blinkered in terms of research design, and their wives were very nearly driven mad by the lack of support they received as they entered motherhood themselves. Yet! We are still fed ideas about What Babies Need From The Mother Only, Okay? that derive from this pool of knowledge.

It’s a great book well written, and Nancy was good enough to speak to me about it. So let’s get into it. (I’ve edited lightly.)

KAFKA’S BABY: Having come through undergraduate psych, this incredibly gigantic body of work is simplified to a very few pieces: We learn about the cloth mother, we learn about attachment theory, we learn about the “strange situation,” and these are given as the fundamental building blocks. There's obviously so much that's missing. Why are these the ideas that we have been left with?

NANCY REDDY: I'm obsessed with this. Those are the ideas that have seeped so far into the popular understanding not just of motherhood, but really of relationships. But it certainly took me a lot of time and a lot of reading, a lot of thinking and living my own life to be like, this can't be right, to figure out that there have to be other ways of thinking about these things.

What gets taken away at least from Harlow's cloth mother studies, what gets taken away from attachment theory is the idea that like what a kid needs most, what a baby needs most is an ongoing, uninterrupted, continuous relationship with a primary caregiver. And more recent writers are really careful to say “caregiver,” but, well, [Harlow] said mother. He had an asterisk and said “mother figure” every once in a while, but he really clearly meant—and I would argue that the research today as well is really focused on—moms.

For the biological person who has given birth, it’s “Congratulations, this is all your job, and your child's entire emotional future life, their health, their ability to have positive relationships in the future is all dependent on their mom's ability to meet all of their needs when they're small.”

If you look at the research, it's more complicated than that.

The people behind the research make up a big chunk of the book and what a bunch of characters they are. We have Harry Harlow, John Bowlby, William Sears, you have kind of an acolyte of Bowlby in Mary Ainsworth. Did you know that they were all monsters before you got into researching the project?

I've been I've been trying to think like, are they monsters or are they just people who were complicated and messed up, as we all are? If nothing else, all the men who devoted themselves to and devoted their careers to telling moms what to do were pretty terrible parents—none of their kids had anything good to say about them in adulthood. Their wives and ex-wives were real mad at them, and I guess we look backwards in time and are like, oh, it's not good, but I don't think it's helpful to judge them by the standards of our day.

Their wives in their own time often were like no seriously here, you have to hang out with this kid like at least a little bit, take this child to the lab. [One of Harry Harlow’s kids] has these memories of spending Saturday mornings at a primate lab with his dad, which is maybe better than nothing, but it's not really exactly engaged, loving fathering.

They use the term “maternal failure,” but they never mention paternal failure, which is what they embody entirely. Harry has his wife, Clara, who works with him, and when they get married, she has to quit the lab because of nepotism rules. So then he hooks up with another research assistant, marries her, and so she has to quit the lab. Their work comes at the cost of the women and their families. How paternalistic is the entire parenting discipline?

Yeah, I mean, it's this wild thing, right? That the study of motherhood has largely been done—at least in the places that have really shaped our discourse and our understanding of motherhood—[by people who] were not actually really doing much parenting at all and also really refused to listen to their wives’ lived experience of motherhood. It's not just that they're flawed humans, but that the science is worse. They presented their findings as, “This is what the science says,” and they were not taking in all of the available information.

The research methodology is a big piece and I really appreciate that you understand how other disciplines do it and what is missing. Obviously the ethics of how we conduct experiments has changed since, like, the Milgram experiment. Did you want to tell me a little bit about these bizarre sadistic experiments and the idea that we would learn from them like we're learning from nature?

Anyone who's taken an intro-to-psychology class has a picture of Harry Harlow's baby monkeys and their cloth mothers haunting their brain somewhere. I watched videos from his lab when I was doing the research and especially if you've had a baby, if you had the experience of soothing and comforting a baby and you watch this monkey rocking and comforting himself with the cloth mother, there's a really visceral connection to that experience. So I can see how he got from monkeys to human mothers.

So Harlow's research, what he was trying to study was maternal attachment. And he took these newborn monkeys away from their actual monkey mothers because that's much harder to control as an experiment. And there were a couple of different experimental conditions inside each cage.

There was wire mother—just a wire cone—and a cloth mother where the cone was wrapped in terry cloth and it was warmed. He eventually gave the cloth mothers faces too, although they have bicycle reflectors as eyes, they're really very upsetting, and in some cages it was the cloth mother that had the formula in it, in some cases it was the wire. And what he found is that the monkeys would spend hours and hours and hours clinging to those cloth mothers, whether it was the one who fed them or not. If they had a wire mother delivering the food, they would skip off and eat for a little bit and then run right back.

The title of the first talk Harlow gave on that research is "The nature of love,” and he talks about the fact that psychology now has this method for studying love, and you can see how he got there because the babies really do cling to this surrogate mother.

But it's also so messed up because those monkeys had a mother and because it looks in the short term like he's raised these healthy monkey babies because they're growing, he has these nice charts. It looks like good scientific proof, but in the long run, those babies turn out to be profoundly disturbed. They can't socially connect with other babies. When they're impregnated, they turn out to be pretty abusive as mothers because they don't have any social intelligence. They've been cared for by this … he called it a “perfect monkey mother,” but they're really damaged.

And then on top of that he offers the variation of the evil mother, like “what if we make the cloth mother provide the nurturing but then occasionally spikes come out.”

It's so dark. He was obsessed with his research and he was obsessed with research design. So you can see him trying out different things. And yeah, so he designs this evil mother that has like spokes that spike out periodically and attack the baby and then they were trapped. And he discovers that the monkey's bond with its cloth mother is so profound that the monkey will go right back to the mother that's just stabbed him. And that's the kind of thing where I don't even know how to think about that, right? Other than it's so horrible.

Yeah. It seems a stretch to then apply those findings to humans, I mean, you've created an abnormal situation.

Part of what I'm really interested in with like Harlow and with Bowlby is just how good they were at getting their messages out into popular media. They were very good at having a really clear distilled message, They had these images that looked really appealing. Bowlby especially was a master of finding people whose research seemed to agree with him and forming these little kind of cohorts so they would get attention together.

And then oftentimes just ignoring people who were like, actually, that's not maybe as conclusive as you think it is. It's really this fascinating study in [not just] how science gets made, but also how it gets picked up and circulated and the role that the press played in circulating what was the messaging at the time—that mothers were super super important and they needed to be at home.

Yeah even as a fairly secure parent, I get the appeal of the idea that there's a diagnostic you could do like the strange situation and be like “I passed.” I think about dropping my kids off at daycare when they were little and wondering if I have passed.

I think that's part of our makeup, right? Like yeah, you can prove that I'm doing this right? It's really hard to resist that.

Yeah, you talk about they found a way to like study love, which is a soft science, let's say, and so they wanted to look at like whether there's this maternal instinct that's inherent in parents, and also how important that nurturing is for kids and how much they need, you know, trying to come up with hard answers for this. So I love two things that you say. One is “Nearly every part of parenting is learned.” And you write, “Love is the daily work of connecting and falling short and making repairs.” So I'm curious how you would separate these questions of baby care/care skills/technical skills and the idea of relationship-building or love?

That's a good question. It's helpful to think about parenting and caregiving as having those two overlapping domains where there are technical skills, like how do you change a diaper? How do you put a diaper on correctly? How do you like feed a bottle to a baby? Those are all things that I had to learn how to do. And then there's the kind of affective domain of love and connection and that interpersonal part of it. And I think those are distinct, but they're also overlapping.

I write about Alison Gopnik towards the end of the book, and her argument is that, we think we provide care for our children because we love them. And really, it's the opposite—that we love them because we care. The caring we do builds the love, and I find that really profound because there's so much mythology around motherhood and like, Oh, you'll just love your baby instantly and you'll be overwhelmed and you'll know what to do and your maternal instincts will kick in and all of that, and it's true that I did love my baby as soon as he was born but it makes sense that when you spend time with someone, when you care for them, when you feel a reciprocity of connection, that's how you build love—it's not an instant biological switch.

And so there is this level of anxiety baked into the parenting discourse now not by the writers that I love but you know there is this idea that you can almost unwittingly commit abandonment, maybe, right? You don't meet every need and there's the gap and it's a scar that'll have with them forever. You've failed them already, right? As opposed to this idea that, as you say, it's a process, you're learning together.

And you write, “You don't have to choose between being an endlessly devoted, constantly available mother or leaving your baby in the backyard and sending your seven-year-old off to boarding school, the alternative is sharing the work.” But I do think that's a real anxiety that people feel in the way that attachment is framed.

How do you debunk that false dichotomy?

The lore of the black and white thinking is so real, right? That I have to do all of this correctly. I have to get my kid a secure attachment or something terrible will befall them. And I think it's still easy for me to kind of catastrophize in that way. But I just don't think it's productive to think about any kind of relationship in those binary terms to think, you know, either my kid's going to be attached or not attached.

So much of our mythology around motherhood wants us to think of it as this performance and this skin that we put on and it's a role and we do it correctly. And a) that's like really joyless and exhausting. And b) I just don't think it's real. Like parenting, mothering is a relationship and it evolves over time. It involves multiple people. And the obsession with trying to be a good mother, which haunted me in early motherhood and still pops up, it made it really hard to be a person with a kid.

And I think that our kids also deserve us to be actual real people connecting with them rather than kind of perfect cloth mothers.

You talk about missing pieces, which is like the dads contributing more and picking up some of the weight, and you talk about community building. I'm wondering how far off you went into alternative models of radical kinship, polymaternalism, or other food for thought.

Yeah, that's all stuff that I'm super interested in. I think I talk about it a little bit in the book, but Dani McClain's book We Live For The We, which talks about black mothering as a political act. That's an incredible book that that spins so many things that we have in our culture on their head. That book is from 2019 so it's not new but it feels very relevant to me where I feel like her answer is really like, "Yeah, we are parenting under not-ideal conditions." And the answer to that is not to double down on the home and homesteading, but to actually be out in your community.

McClain talks about all the black mothers for whom really, really difficult issues, including having your children killed by the police, has launched them into public service, has pushed them out into the world instead of turning their home into a bunker. It's something that I thought about a lot.

I think, obviously, you hit a limit with what science can do, so I'm curious, you know, at what point you're looking outside of science for kind of guidance or whatnot. How old is Penn now?

11.

Oh, 11. Okay. You're a little bit ahead of me. I have 8 and 9 right now. And it's interesting how the parenting industry and parenting media is so skewed towards people coming into the funnel.

Yeah, now I'm like, I've escaped, right? There are fewer people trying to tell me what to do with my middle schooler than with my baby. It's freeing for sure.

No, it's true. Do you have any frameworks you like?

What's way more interesting to me is anthropological ethnographic work where someone has actually spent time in a community trying to understand how families work, how parenting works, and where they're not trying to leap from place to another. Before my kid was born, did you ever read Bringing Up Bebe?

Oh yeah.

I was obsessed with that book in part because it seemed to promise like if I can just do it the correct way, if I could do like Le pause—

Yeah.

(even more Frenchly) Le pause—then my baby will sleep. And I remember standing over a crib and being like I'm trying to pause, but he's still screaming. He's gonna keep screaming if I pick him up. And it took me a long time to realize that a lot of that stuff works because those women have maternity leave, all of this structural stuff is actually what's making it work. So there are ways that we want to look to other cultures for answers but we want to just import things without actually understanding how messed up our culture is.

The one book that doesn't do that that I really like is Michaeleen Doucleff’s Hunt, Gather, Parent. In it, she takes her daughter with her to study these three different indigenous communities and she's really careful not to say, These people are more natural than we are, she's really careful to say, Here's what they do, here's how it works for them, and here's how I've tried to adapt it to my own life back in the United States.

Yeah like why aren't you wearing your baby in a papoose breastfeeding on demand all day. Well, I'm not moving reindeer.

Yeah exactly. I mean some of the stuff she talks about in that book there are these lovely sections where you see a community in the Arctic Circle, and there are huge crowds of kids in a house, and the kids are all spending time together, and this is a real multi-age thing, and it's casual and fun and joyous, and the kids are looking out for each other. But it's also made possible because they live in a very small community where they can just like walk from one house to another—a lot of us don't live that close to our friends, where we can walk into their house at any time of day. And we have a work day that probably doesn't accommodate that.

The Good Mother Myth is out now from St. Martin’s Press.

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